FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The UNITY: Journalists of Color organization has a new press release (7/14/09) denouncing July 8 comments by Fox and Friends‘ Brian Kilmeade, in which he “made a crude and bafflingly ignorant attempt to dismiss a study on marriage and Alzheimer’s that was conducted in Sweden and Finland.” Kilmeade’s remarks that “we [Americans] keep marrying other […]
Editor & Publisher is running a wire item (Associated Press, 7/16/09) on the Richmond Times-Dispatch‘s recent front-page editorial and website video “expressing regret for supporting the state’s fight to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.” The paper’s confession of its “central role in the ‘dreadful doctrine’ of Massive Resistance–a systematic campaign […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Barack Obama’s recent trip to Africa gave the press corps a chance to opine predictably on Obama’s “unique role” as a “son of Africa” who was specially suited to “tell African leaders hard truths”. It should’ve also been a chance for a serious look at the substance of U.S. […]
Writing that “the swine flu outbreak that wrecked Mexico’s economy this spring, and that the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic last month, may become a case study in reckless journalism,” Miami Herald Latin America correspondent Andres Oppenheimer (7/8/09) admits that he “had taken it for granted that the disease had started in Mexico” […]
Number of stories in the Nexis news database dated today that mentioned Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R.-Ala.) questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, in which Sessions accused Sotomayor of harboring ethnic prejudices: 69 Number of such stories that recalled that Sessions was rejected as a judicial nominee in 1986 in part because of his approving […]
The Women’s Media Center has a new action (7/10/09) asking you to support “Media Justice for Sotomayor” against the fact that ,”since the announcement of [her] nomination to the Supreme Court, some in the media have engaged in sexist and racist attacks against her” which are “often packaged as ‘news’ and endlessly discussed in mainstream […]
Robin Varghese’s 3 Quarks Daily link (6/30/09) to a Boston Review piece purporting that, “over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed antisemitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chavez himself,” has engendered some homespun media criticism from a commenter logged-in as “Pepito,” who argues that “this canard about […]
The Houston Chronicle‘s Susan Carroll (6/30/09) reports that Fox News celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera “was touched” by the televised statement of a daughter mourning her law enforcement father who “was killed last week by a suspected illegal immigrant,” but also stepped up to speak to the truth larger than divisive media coverage of the matter: […]
[See also the sidebar to this piece, Sotomayor vs. Bork: NYT by the Numbers] Writing about Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Politico’s Mike Allen (5/27/09) declared: The media’s left-of-center bias is rarely more apparent than during court fights. The coverage running up to the pick was slanted heavily […]
Ishmael Reed’s contextualization (CounterPunch, 6/29/09) of the epic demonization of Michael Jackson within historical U.S. media racism also takes a swipe at CNN‘s Black in America program, “an exercise meant to boost ratings by making whites feel good by making blacks look bad, the marketing strategy of the mass media since the 1830s“: In preparing […]
Former Sean Hannity show regular Hal Turner recently was arrested for blogging that “we have enough bullets to put… down” those not heeding his “warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.” While criminal prosecution most definitely is not the general solution for hateful commentary, the Hartford Courant‘s Edmund H. Mahony (6/25/09) reports […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Events in Iran continue to unfold with protests still underway in what seemed to begin as a rejection of the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Has it become something more now? And how are the press corps–not famously nuanced on Iran–handling events? We’ll hear from David Barsamian, founder and […]
Blogger Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 6/24/09) has noted that when “CBS ran a story about the latest batch of Nixon tapes made public… they included a section of a February 21, 1973 conversation with Billy Graham that showed Nixon at his psycho best,” addressing anti-Semitism thus: “This has happened to the Jews, happened in […]
Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan are reporting (San Francisco Bay Guardian online, 6/19/09) on San Francisco Chronicle immigration reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken’s acceptance of “an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies–which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly […]
A posting on Timothy Karr’s Media Citizen blog (6/17/09) contrasts Crooks & Liars‘ collection of cable news pundits like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly likening the anti-immigrant Minutemen to a giant, friendly “neighborhood watch” organization with the “chilling double-murder” Minutemen leader Shawna Forde is accused of–describing “the 911 recording of the mother as she witnessed […]
In wonderment that, as “Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is making the rounds of the Capitol this week,” corporate pundit “jackasses are still saying she has to explain her ‘wise Latina’ comment,” Laura Flanders (Women In Media & News, 6/4/09) remarks that “the money-media have spent the week making the comment ‘controversial’ (and then calling […]
There’s almost too much to say about this recent column Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine. But let’s start by parsing this: In the good old days of the last century, the years before the collapse of the economy and the World Trade Center towers, political discourse in the U.S. was, too often, rutted in […]
Reporting that “reactionary radio host and white supremacist Hal Turner was taken into custody Wednesday after remarks urging Catholics to ‘take up arms’ against two Connecticut lawmakers and a state ethics official over legislation… regarding the church,” independent news outlet Raw Story‘s John Byrne (6/4/09) deepens the story by recalling that “Turner used to be […]
Imagine that the executive director of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network punched a woman in the head while uttering a racial epithet. Imagine further that two years after this hate crime took place, the executive director still had his job, and when Sharpton was asked about this, he speculated about why this story was […]
Progressive critic Dr. Roberto Rodriguez has a new commentary (New America Media, 6/2/09) demonstrating how the miserable press reaction to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s U.S. Supreme Court “nomination clearly shows us is that what this nation needs is more incisive journalism, not less.” But, Rodriguez laments, “to be sure, the rise of right-wing media, which include […]
